Winning photographer ‘pushing photojournalism forward’

Pictures of the Year International announcedNoor’s Yuri Kozyrev as the 2011 photographer of the year in the freelance/agency category last week. His winning image shows rebels running for cover on the road between Benghazi and Tripoli as Libyan forces dropped bombs.

“They were just boys curious to be on the frontline. Most didn’t even have weapons,” Kozyrev says of the subjects in the photo, taken last March for TIME magazine. (TIME is owned by CNN’s parent company, Time Warner.)

As the rebels scrambled to find cover in the flat desert, Kozyrev turned to capture this moment (image No. 7).

“It was just a moment I saw, then I tried to find a place to hide,” said the Russian photographer. “I am a human being like anyone else; I can be scared, but it’s all about the moment.”

While Kozyrev never imagined himself covering conflicts across the globe, he’s able to express himself through his photographs, he said. His brother, a journalist, inspired him to begin shooting. He never considered becoming a writer like his brother but found instead that photography was natural for him.

Plus, he added, it allows him to travel and meet new people. On assignments, he stays with locals, which is a “great part of the job,” he said. “You need to be on the ground, staying with people, understanding what they’re going through.”

“There is great heart and clarity in Yuri’s work,” TIME’s director of photography Kira Pollack said in an e-mail. “Yuri’s pictures are cinematic. They are alive. There is a tremendous energy to his frames.” And it sets him apart from other photographers, she said.

Photojournalism is a tough career, between trying to be in the right place at the right time and competing with television to produce fresh scenes. But Kozyrev believes it still holds importance.

“Our job is to remind the people in Paris and New York with cappuccinos that some people are suffering at the same time. … An ordinary person might only spend one and a half seconds looking at the picture, but to get the picture, sometimes people sacrifice their life.”

Kozyrev considers it as an incredible privilege to witness and cover world events. And he does an award-winning job.

“There is a fair amount of photojournalism that goes toward darkness and mood,” TIME’s Pollack said. “Yuri’s pictures do the opposite. … Yuri Kozyrev is an example of a photographer who is pushing photojournalism forward through his signature style.”

– Elizabeth I. Johnson, CNN

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Editor’s Note: Steve Sasson, the inventor of the digital camera, will be inducted today into theConsumer Electronics Hall of Fame in San Diego, CA.

In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it.  “It” being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera.  It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4.  On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder.  Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

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When the Irish-born photographer Andrew McConnell saw some images from his project “The Last Colony” displayed side by side for the first time earlier this week, even he was surprised by the strength in numbers.

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By KERRI MACDONALD

It isn’t quite nostalgia. But Jim Lo Scalzo’s quietly haunting multimedia piece “America’s Dead Sea” evokes something like it.

“You’re looking at a remarkable idea,” says an eager voice on an archival audio track. “An idea that has intrigued, and attracted, and literally thrilled thousands upon thousands of men, women and children. This is the story of the miracle sea in the desert.”

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Editor’s choice

By ANTHONY SHADID, LYNSEY ADDARIO, STEPHEN FARRELL and TYLER HICKS

Published: March 22, 2011

This article is by Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks.

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Improve your vacation snapshots.

• Posted By: Robert Lachman
• Posted On: 9:38 a.m. | March 17, 2011

This weekend, photographers, writers and editors from The Times will be present at the Los Angeles Times Travel & Adventure Show at the L.A. Convention Center.